King of the Mound: My Summer With Satchel Paige
Read King of the Mound: My Summer With Satchel Paige Online
Authors: Wes Tooke
“I had a cousin who got polio,” Satch said after a minute.
Nick opened his eyes. “What happened to him?”
“He died. But that was a long time ago. Back when I was a kid.”
“I know I’m lucky,” Nick said. “But I still miss baseball. I always wanted to be a pitcher like you.”
Satch smiled a cocky smile. “There ain’t no pitcher like me.” The smile slowly faded. “Why can’t you pitch?”
“You can’t pitch on one leg,” Nick said.
Satch shook his head. “There are lots of things in life that you aren’t supposed to be able to do. People told me a black kid couldn’t make no money in baseball. People told me anyone born Down the Bay was going to die there. People told me I was going to go straight from reform school to jail. But I didn’t pay any of those people no mind, and that’s why I’m driving a silver convertible that made some cop so jealous that he just had to pull me over.”
—from
King of the Mound
avoid being born average,
but there ain’t no man
got to be common.”
—Satchel Paige
W
HEN
N
ICK IS RELEASED FROM THE
hospital after suffering from polio, he is sure that his father will never look at him in the same way again. Once the best pitcher in youth league, Nick now walks with a limp and is dependent on a heavy leg brace. He isn’t sure he will ever return to the mound, never mind be the star he once was.
When Nick starts working for Mr. Churchill, the owner of the semiprofessional team Nick’s dad plays for, he meets Satchel Paige, arguably the best pitcher in the world. Not allowed in the major leagues because of his skin color, Satchel teaches Nick that some things can be overcome with hard work and dedication, and that just because you’re down, you are most certainly not out.
As Satchel and his unique teammates barnstorm toward a national baseball tournament, Nick wonders if he can really overcome what seems like the impossible and pitch again.
A JUNIOR LIBRARY GUILD SELECTION
WES TOOKE
has written a novel about baseball for adults along with screenplays and articles for various publications. His first novel for middle graders,
Lucky
, was a Junior Library Guild Selection. Wes lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter. You can visit him online at westooke.com.
Jacket design by Krista Vossen
Jacket illustration copyright © 2012 by Tim Jessell
S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
B
OOKS FOR
Y
OUNG
R
EADERS
Simon & Schuster • New York
Also by Wes Tooke
Lucky
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Wes Tooke
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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Book design by Krista Vossen
The text for this book is set in Melior.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tooke, Wes.
King of the Mound: My Summer with Satchel Paige / Wes Tooke. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Twelve-year-old Nick loves baseball so after a year in the hospital fighting polio and with a brace on one leg, Nick takes a job with the team for which his father is catcher and gets to see the great pitcher, Satchel Paige, play during the 1935 season. Includes historical notes.
ISBN 978-1-4424-3346-5 (hardcover)
[1. Baseball—Fiction. 2. People with disabilities—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 4. Paige, Satchel, 1906-1982—Fiction. 5. African Americans—Fiction. 6. Poliomyelitis—Fiction. 7. Bismarck (N.D.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.T638Her 2012
[Fic]—dc22
2011012740
ISBN 978-1-4424-3348-9 (eBook)
For my wife
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Courtney Bongiolatti and Simon & Schuster for supporting this project and to Dan Lazar at Writers House for his diligence. I am also grossly indebted to the work of numerous writers and historians, especially William Price Fox, who conducted a fabulous series of interviews with Satchel recorded in
Satchel Paige’s America
, and an essay by Travis Larsen entitled “Satchel Paige and Hap Dumont: The Dynamic Duo of the National Baseball Congress Tournament.” Several of Fox’s stories from his interviews with Satchel—including a few quotes—are dramatized in this book.
Nick stared at the strike zone and took a deep breath. That was something his dad had taught him; he said it relaxed your shoulders and cleared your head. As soon as Nick’s lungs were empty, he began his windup, the movements as smooth and natural as the breath he had just taken, until—
SMACK!
The rubber ball nailed the center of the chalk square on the wall, skipped neatly on the polished linoleum, and landed next to Nick in the hospital bed.
“Twenty-nine,” Nick said to himself.
He picked up the ball, focused on the chalk target again, and took another breath. But before he could begin his windup, Dr. Miller appeared in the door.
“Are you wearing out my wall again?” Dr. Miller asked. He kept a straight face, but Nick knew he was joking—Dr. Miller was the only adult in the whole hospital who wasn’t afraid to laugh.
“I’m trying to break my record before I leave,” Nick said.
“What’s your record?”
Nick pointed at the chalk square. “Inside the strike zone eighty-seven times in a row.”
Dr. Miller raised an eyebrow. “Eighty-seven is a whole lot.”
“I guess,” Nick said. “But not as many as eighty-eight.”
This time Dr. Miller did smile. “You keep that attitude and you’re going to be fine. Are you ready to go?”
Nick felt his heart speed up—the same nervous feeling he used to get when there was a man on third base and nobody out. “He’s here?”
“Waiting downstairs.” Dr. Miller glanced at Nick’s duffel bag, which was lying next to the door. “You tighten up your brace and I’ll get the bag.”
“I’ll take the bag,” Nick said. “He won’t like it if I’m not carrying my own bag.”
Nick could tell that Dr. Miller was staring at him, but he kept his eyes locked on the metal bar at the foot of his bed. He hated the look that doctors and nurses would sometimes get—like they felt sorry for you but didn’t know what to say. Nick didn’t want pity. Maybe his left leg didn’t work the way it was supposed to, but most of the kids who came through the ward had worse problems. Polio was a terrifying disease. In mild cases you would get symptoms similar to the flu, but if you were sick enough to get transferred to this hospital, it meant you had nerve damage, which often meant paralysis. Some of the kids on the ward couldn’t walk at all—or even sit up in bed. And the very sickest ones couldn’t breathe for themselves and had to be stuck in a terrifying machine called an iron lung.